An exploration of intercultural and interspecies understandings through karaoke and visual storytelling.

How do we communicate across the boundaries of one’s own understanding? This is what Kexin Hao, Maja Simišić, Tuana Inhan, Gabi Dao aim to uncover during Evidence in Motion #5: Empty Orchestra through using karaoke and visual storytelling and time-based media as a way to create multi-layered narratives that connect us with our environment. Within their works, the artists give our favourite cringe-worthy pastime a makeover, by using it as a vessel to tell stories that bridge intercultural and interspecies boundaries. Through reappropriating the aesthetics of singing, dance, and strange background videos, they create interactive experiences that allow us to change our own perspective. Empty Orchestra creates a stage for these explorations to come to life and amplify the voice of “the other”. Creating a safe space to express and change perspectives, that embraces the imperfect just as karaoke does.

Inspired by pop cultural references, the artists are revealing the stigma of being a pest from bats and follow their journey as an endangered species, to exploring the peculiar connections that humans have to house plants as aesthetic objects in artificial environments, to creating platonic pseudo love songs for immigration immigration lawyers. Reimagining the project space of iii as a otherworldly and multifaceted karaoke club for everyone – human and more-than-human.

Tuana Ihnan

Tuana Inhan (Istanbul, 1994) is a visual designer, curator and researcher with a specific interest in the unexpected encounters of nature and culture. She bases her research on eco-politics, community building and popular culture. Her multidisciplinary approach combines audiovisual media, and collaborative research for the aim of discovering the thin lines where human and non human, natural and digital encounter in this quickly shifting times.

Through her visual essays, videos, music and installations that playfully celebrate the awkward and unexpected, she seeks to examine wider eco-political discourses such as climate crisis, contemporary value systems and commodification of non-humans. The underlying question is often; how in such a moment of crisis the contemporary human relates to its surrounding, its values, its past/future, and its planet.

Kexin Hao

Kexin Hao (CN, 1993) is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. Her practice is a marriage of design and performance. Kexin likes to challenge the boundaries between art and “non-art” space. She thinks beyond the disciplines of design, performance, game, clubbing, and fitness, which results in a rich hybridity in her art-making. Using a daring visual language, Kexin’s works is a constant swing between intimate close-up on personal stories and zoom-out to collective narratives; between a past of political heaviness and a flashy modernity rendered in humour and sarcasm. In her recent practice, Kexin investigates in the themes of body, rituals, health, labour, and collective memory.

Kexin has done residencies at iii (instrument inventors initiative) and V2_; and has shown her works at Rewire festival, TEC ART, GOGBOT Festival, L.E.V. Festival(ES), as well as places such as MAMA, V2_, Worm, W139, PIP, Luxelakes·A4 Art Museum(CN). She has participated in various educational programs by giving workshops and artist talks at Sandberg Institute, ArtEz, Städelschule Architecture Class Frankfurt, and Klasse Digitale Grafik (HFBK) Hamburg.

Maja Simišić

Maja Simišić is a multidisciplinary maker who makes work about everyday battles and how to turn them into something completely different. In her work, Simišić attempts to overturn existing gender norms and question class differences. As a woman who grew up in the Balkans and now works in the Western world, her artistic approach is strongly influenced by the Western vision of Eastern Europe and the mindset of people growing up in the Balkans. The role of women in this context is always interesting and relevant for Simišić.

Gabi Dao

Gabi Dao (she/they) is an artist and organizer currently based between the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (colonially known as Vancouver, Canada) and Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

She is interested in sensory entanglements and affirmations— the ways these can insist on counter-memory, multiple truths, other ways of knowing and blurred temporalities, against the capitalist linearity of cause-and-effect. Often these manifest through long gestating, fragmentary periods of research, eventually becoming sculpture, installation, collage, moving image, sound, miscellaneous forms of writing and community events. Dao previously screened, exhibited and participated in projects across Turtle Island, Europe and Asia.

Yannik Güldner – curator

Yannik Güldner is an auto-didact curator, programmer and cultural producer based in The Hague, investigating the intersections of contemporary and popular culture through exhibition making. Aiming to question structures of power and society at large through the eyes of upcoming and renewed artists within their multidisciplinary practices. Working through a broad spectrum of formats, he aims to connect artists with audiences to open new communication channels and contribute to societal development through the arts. Alongside this, he is the founder and curator of the platform thespectrum.space and part of the organisational team of the WASTELAND festival, next to holding two positions as a guest curator for iii and The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague. 

This program is supported by the Municipality of The Hague and the Creative Industries Fund NL